Site Mobile Navigation

Debt of Honor

‘Ghosting,’ a Novel by Kirby Gann

Midway through Kirby Gann’s third novel, “Ghosting,” Cole Prather recalls a flooded sinkhole near his childhood home that seemed to have no bottom. Cole and his half brother, Fleece, spent afternoons throwing things into its maw, watching them slip out of sight, marveling at what the subterranean space held and imagining a future when “everything they had left there could be rediscovered.”

A different kind of rediscovery is at the center of this occasionally frustrating, often thrilling and largehearted novel. When Fleece, a driver for the local drug lord, disappears with an entire season’s crop of marijuana, Cole becomes convinced the family history hides clues to his whereabouts, and he begins to excavate their enigmatic past. There is much to learn: while “Ghosting” is organized around the search for Fleece, it is also about Cole’s quest to fashion an identity from the fragments of a fractured childhood.

Photo

Kirby GannCredit
Ig Publishing

Cole was raised in Lake Holloway, a crime-­ridden, poverty-­blighted area the citizens of surrounding Pirtle County think of as “the kind of place people often disappeared from.” At 12 he was sent to live with a respectable family in nearby Montreux; Cole’s drug-addled mother hoped their relative wealth would cleave him from his humble roots. “But they succeeded,” she grimly reflects, “only in making the boy a stranger to both houses.”

He returns to Lake Holloway after high school with dreams of becoming an underwater welder, but this plan is soon eclipsed by his compulsion to find his half brother. The drug dealers, toughs and acquaintances he questions urge him to let Fleece go, mindful that his interest could provoke the drug lord, Lawrence Greuel, but their oblique answers only strengthen his resolve. Recalling Fleece’s admonition that “the only way to know the truth of a story is you got to go through the whole story yourself,” Cole takes a risk: he asks Greuel to let him make the next drug run in Fleece’s place. The gamble works, putting him right at the heart of Fleece’s world and leading him to retrace the steps of his brother’s final delivery.

Despite his prominent role, Fleece remains a cipher even in flashback, and it gradually becomes clear he’s largely a device to let Cole (and Gann) explore the family’s background. This quest does pay off, in a manner of speaking: by the novel’s close both Cole and the reader fully understand the world from which he emerged, and what dread promise it holds. Gann achieves this by probing each character’s history, skillfully weaving mysteries that occurred generations ago, then unraveling them in lurid tales of blood and betrayal.

“Ghosting” offers a high-low cocktail of lovely prose and cruel deeds. The amorphous nature of Cole’s interests can be frustrating, but these moments are outshined by pages of expansive writing and palpable suspense. Gann populates his novel with darkly beautiful images: a car set alight in the yard of an abandoned seminary, a lightning strike on a transformer, a fence decorated with bleached bones viewed in day-bright moonlight. In the gathering mood, even that sinkhole from Cole’s childhood assumes a strangely alluring ominous quality. “Ghosting,” fittingly, propels the reader along with a similar sense of anticipation. Its mysteries are its rewards.

GHOSTING

By Kirby Gann

286 pp. Ig Publishing. Paper, $15.95.

Keith Dixon is the author of a memoir and two novels, “The Art of Losing” and “Ghostfires.”

A version of this review appears in print on June 3, 2012, on Page BR43 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Debt of Honor. Today's Paper|Subscribe